This bookstore is tiny. You were drawn in by some of your favorite books in the window: Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage, and Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. A sign on a small table reads, “So you liked The Hearing Trumpet? More on surrealist secrets and secret societies.” You didn’t know there were surrealist secret societies, but now you have to read more about them.
“French Comedy of Horrors” is a novella in Roberto Bolaño’s collection Cowboy Graves. It follows a Guyanese youth being recruited by hacked payphone to a surrealist secret society in the sewers of Paris.
A Brief History of Portable Literature: Some of your favorite surrealists, writers, artists, and magicians are all part of Enrique Vila-Matas’s brief conspiracy—a secret society called the Shandies, obsessed with all things portable.
The Great Camouflage collects Martinican surrealist Suzanne Césaire’s writings from the journal Tropiques that she edited with her husband, Aimé, and René Ménil. While not exactly a secret society, Tropiques collected seditious perspectives against Vichy fascism in coded writing about Martinican culture and surrealist thought.
A QR code on the table links you to Jason Earle’s paper “Surrealism’s Secret Societies” for further reading.
A note on links: Whenever possible, I have linked books available for purchase at Massive Bookshop, an abolitionist, anti-profit online bookstore, which uses its profits to bail people out of jail. If books are not available on Massive Bookshop, I try to link other independent booksellers. But I also encourage you to shop local whenever possible.
Why am I pretending to have a bookstore? I explained it on the About page.
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